 Thank you, Scott. Thank you all. A little bit more about my background and how I got, why I've become obsessed with the question of Christianity and culture. And I should say, very specifically interested in the shape of modern Western culture. I went to seminary at Westminster Seminary years ago. And there was some theology of culture thinking that was going on, but not much that engaged with actually specific historical questions about the shape of modernity in particular. And I really think that any kind of Christian thinking about culture has to actually look at specific cultural change and development that we have to look at it as a dynamic thing. I was raised in a conservative Christian home and that was very involved in music. My parents were amateur church musicians and my extended family, the Welsh side of the family, had a lot of singers in it. Evans was like Jones, I think, or also another Welsh name, I think. And when I was in high school, had the great good fortune of going to a public school that had a very good music program. The choral teacher there had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, which was pretty amazing for a public high school in a middle class neighborhood. I didn't know who Mademoiselle Boulanger was. He would yell at us and he would quote Mademoiselle Boulanger. I was 14. I had no idea. The way we were singing Bach wasn't right, according to Mademoiselle Boulanger. It wasn't until years later I found out who she was. Somebody I read recently said she was the most influential teacher since Socrates, which is maybe a little overstated. But if you don't know much about Nadia Boulanger, let me encourage you to do that. So here I was, 14 years old, and I had the great good fortune of being taught how to sing by someone who I actually traced Nadia Boulanger's. I think she studied, she either studied with Fourier Ravel and I traced her own musical lineage. I was hoping I could get back to Bach. I got back to Fuchs, who was a contemporary Bach. Johann Fuchs. But it went through Sanson Mendelssohn. And so she has this amazing, and this actually has, this is relevant to that topic, because I'm going to talk about the role of cultural traditions in the church. So anyway, I was exposed to this music. We sang Yesumanna Freud at my sophomore year in high school. And actually, I have a recording on vinyl of this high school choir, and I've played it for friends. They can't believe it's high school choir. This was in the late 60s, at a time when most churches that were serious about the music in the churches hired people who had been connected to the tradition of Western art music rather than people who were mostly influenced by popular music. And I think that's a huge change in church history, as well as in cultural history. I ended up studying film aesthetics, film theory, and criticism as an undergraduate, and went to work at National Public Radio shortly after college in the Arts and Performance Division. And then took two years off to go to seminary, went back to NPR when Morning Edition went on the air. And I was Arts and Humanities Editor for Morning Edition, which meant I had responsibility for 18 minutes a day of arts coverage. And this was at a time when NPR, as a cultural institution, was also rooted in the idea of there being a great tradition of high culture that required and deserved a kind of stewardly custodial attitude. NPR no longer has that conviction. But in the late, well, I went to work there originally in the mid-'70s and into the early-'80s. It was in the early-'80s NPR began to abandon the idea of sustaining the best of a cultural tradition, just as, and that's why the National Endowment for the Arts was originally founded. If you go and look at the legislation that formed the National Endowment for the Arts in the mid-1960s, you'll find this notion that the Western tradition, that we are conservators of this great legacy of artistic achievement and a great nation is committed to sustaining that tradition. But I have lived through the loss of that conviction, both in the secular culture, not just at a place like NPR, but you could see the same thing in the universities. And also, the church has followed suit, I think, and abandoned the idea of sustaining a legacy. And part of what I want to do today is talk about why, at the time as I was watching this happen, I didn't realize how big a thing it was. And I think I've come to realize that that really is quite a remarkable thing. But I want to start talking about singing in church and what happens through music in worship. One of the things that happens through music in worship, I think that in worship generally, a congregation is constituted as a community in communion with God, as we are assembled at Glacias. And music is a remarkably fitting way of exemplifying the shape of that communion. Throughout the Christian tradition, there have been two musical metaphors used to describe the communion, the nature of that communion. Unison singing, which was most powerfully expressed, I think, in chant, and harmony, which is present in its simplest forms in hymns. And either in singing in unison or in singing in harmony, we have a sense of unity. And I was speaking at Dallas Seminary this morning and talking about how the loss of singing in harmony in churches, and I go to many churches or Christian schools where people no longer know how to sing in harmony. In fact, I was telling a story. I was at a Christian school recently, liberal arts college, and spoke in a chapel setting and they sang All Creatures of Our God and King as an opening hymn. And I was impressed with the hardiness of the students singing. And the pianist was playing Ralph von Williams, Ray von Williams' classic arrangement of that hymn, which, as you may recall, begins with everyone singing in unison, All Creatures of Our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing. And then traditionally, it goes into harmony. And so the students all singing hardly in unison and we get to the point where the thing kind of opens up into this wonderful harmony. And nobody sang any of the harmony. Everybody's still singing the melody. And I was singing the tenor part very enthusiastically from memory because they didn't have, we had, actually I think they did have hymnals. Yeah, they had hymnals so the parts were there. And I was the only one in a crowd of about 400 apparently. I was the only one not singing the melody. And at first I thought maybe they have some principle maybe there's a rule against singing in harmony. Dietrich Bonhoeffer somewhere says something about how important it is to sing in unison. And I thought well maybe they're Bonhoefferians or something, there's some aesthetic discipline going on here that I wasn't aware of. And I asked the pianist after the service why this happened, why did no one sing in harmony. And particularly in that hymn, it's all about the diversity of creation joining together. So you need harmony, you need different voices making this music work. It's not just an aesthetic decision. It's tied of all hymns to not have harmony. That hymn in particular which is about the unity and diversity of all of creation in praising God. You lose the meaning of the hymn by losing the harmony. So I asked him, is there some rule against this? And he said no it's just that the students all go to churches where nobody sings in harmony because they sing from a projector and they don't have music in front of them but also the music that they sing hasn't been written with choral participation in mind. The music is written as a ballad that hundreds of people sing together as a ballad which there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that but it's a relatively limited musical vocabulary. I grew up, before I could read music, I could harmonize naturally because I'd heard it around me. And I have friends who are Mennonites. I love worshiping in their church because the service, actually they have no instruments and every kid seems to know how to sing a part. Everybody knows how to sing in harmony and it's not genetic. I don't think there's a gene for it but it's part of the cultural tradition that that's what we do. That's what we do as a people. And I think it's a great tragedy that we've lost that. So in singing hymns, a congregation participates in the harmony by singing and even in listening to a choir, a congregation participates by listening. And I gave a talk on this to our congregation recently and I wanted to stress that listening is an active activity. It's not a passive activity. Listening can actually be very demanding. Well, sometimes if it's bad things you're listening to, it makes a particular kind of demand on you. But to listen carefully and to listen attentively requires a level of commitment and activity. So I like to tell people that the congregation is still participating very strongly in listening. This may be a commonplace here in this department. Listening to a carefully constructed and well presented sermon is also a form of participation in the word. So it's no different. And certainly in the scriptures, listening is never pictured as just as passive consumption but as an active and responsible reception. In Romans 15, verses five and six, you have the idea of both unity and harmony characterizing our life together and our worship. It's towards the end of the letter and Paul's kind of winding down. Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be like-minded one toward another according to Christ Jesus. That ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God even the father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And Paul refers to harmony that we should display in a text that explicitly does mention music from the third chapter of the letter to Colossians. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness and patience bearing with one another and if one has a complaint against another forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you so you also must forgive. And above all, these put on love which binds everything together in perfect harmony. This is from the English standard version. I think it's the same in the Revised Standard Version. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful, that the word of Christ dwell in you richly teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in their hearts to God and whatever you do in word or deed do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus giving thanks to God the Father through him. In an essay on liturgical music, William Flynn summarizes how various patristic theologians developed the idea of harmony in the church. And Flynn notes that for Clement of Alexandria the church is in complete symphony or agreement or harmony because it is led by Jesus. Clement writes, the union of many which the divine harmony has called forth out of a medley of sounds and division becomes one symphony following the one leader of the choir and teacher, the Lord resting in that same truth and crying out Abba Father. Origin links the idea of concord in Matthew 18, 19 to 20 with the promise of Christ's presence to those so assembled in his name and he contends that the harmony of those so assembled makes room for the Son of God to be present. What an interesting idea. It's our harmony that makes room for the Son of God to be present. Ambrose combined the insights of these interpretations in his commentary on the parable of the prodigal son. In Luke 15 to 25, the word symphony is used to describe the celebration ordered by the Father upon the Son's return. According to Ambrose, this merry making fittingly included music which points to the harmony restored between the Father and the Son. It's interesting that the fittingness of the presence of music had to do with harmony and I find this interesting. It's almost an inaccessible claim in a culture in which harmony is less and less significant in musical experience and I think that that characterizes much of the 20th century. Ambrose also gives an example of what this harmony is like by referring to the music in his own church. For this is a symphony when there resounds in the church a united concord of different ages and abilities as if of diverse strings. The Psalm is responded to, the amen is said. Now, I'm assuming that in fourth century I don't think there were, we don't know if there was harmony. We think it was probably unison singing but it's very interesting that Ambrose still wants to talk about it in terms of harmony even though it may have been unison singing. Although depending on the acoustics of the space they were in, there may have been harmony because of the reverb in the room which some music obviously takes advantage of that. But here it's probably unison singing by the whole congregation was for Ambrose an image of the unity between God and humanity established with Christ. But he's recognizing that there's still some diversity. He describes them as differing ages and abilities. Maybe there was unintentional harmony by people who weren't actually singing the notes they were supposed to sing. So we have this kind of natural harmony that emerges if that's charitably described. In a book, a music and worship in pagan and Christian antiquity, Johannes Quasten makes an important point concerning the nature of unity described by the patristic authors. The community represented by singing was not only an image of earthly community but was also participation of the earthly community in heavenly worship and therefore in the life of God. Quasten notes that patristic commentators would often prove this by referring to the preface to the Eucharistic prayer where the congregation is invited to join in the singing of the sanctus with all the angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim. I think that when we sing, we're joining in worship, not just with angels, but we're joining in worship with the entire church, past, present and future in a united chorus across time and space. Book that came out a couple years ago by Hans Borsma called Heavenly Participation. Some very interesting ideas there about what he, the term he uses, sacramental time. And I've wondered whether there isn't some kind of almost metaphysical unity that we do enjoy when we sing when the church joins together in music with people who aren't present here with us in some way. Now, the question of aesthetic judgment often comes up in discussion about church music and there are many who would argue that the quality of church music or the quality of any music is entirely subjective and merely conventional. And I'd like to suggest that if that's true, even if it were true, it's precisely the sense of sharing conventions that binds communities. Often people say, well, you know, you have this notion of quality, we have this notion of quality, it doesn't matter, we'll basically take a vote and see which version of quality wins. But part of what I want to get at today is the idea that we can't just shift conventions willy-nilly every 10 years. Being bound to a community is an essential way in which one recognizes moral accountability to the body of which you're a member. That being the case, I think preserving conventions within a community over time is an important way of communicating a sense of belonging. If a group of people is to survive for more than a single generation or even the fraction of a generation, it acquires its identity in and through its memory, which is to say it will establish a tradition. Healthy communities are communities of memory. They recognize their identity even as individuals do through their memory. When I was in college, a script writing, I took a script writing course and the final project for the course was on television script writing. The final project was to write a pilot for a new TV series. And my idea for a TV series involved a minister who in the pilot, you see him ministering to people and he's an amazing, loving and sensitive man. He's an amazingly wise pastor, a powerful preacher. And then he's in an automobile accident and he suffers complete amnesia. And when he wakes up in the hospital, he has no memory of who he was. He has no memory of what he believed. He has no memory of his vocation. And he has none of the practical memories that allowed him to be a wise pastor. That is, wisdom comes through the accumulation of experience and all of the experience he had in dealing with people, he's forgotten. And my idea for this series, I'm sure it would have been popular. My idea for this series was to follow him as he tries to reconstruct, first of all, his own personal faith because he doesn't remember any of the reasons for belief that he had. Now, the identity of an individual is very much tied to memory. And we realize this if we have parents or older people we know who suffer dementia and they can't remember who they are. And in a sense, we have to remember for them who they are, which is a kind of bearing of one another's burdens that I think is pretty important. But why would we practice voluntary dementia? Why would we surrender all of our memories as a community and say, let's forget who we are by just starting fresh with entirely new forms and have no memory at all of who we have been as a community. So I think that just as an individual with amnesia is clueless about identity, severed from an experience that we have and experienced past and severed in a sense from space and time and the experience in space and time from the trajectory of an actual embodied existence. A group of people with no memory can have no sense of the meaning of the matrix of its membership. And that kind of group can be a crowd but it can't finally be a community. The Greeks believe that memory was the mother of the muses and in that belief is an insight into the relationship between the arts and especially music and the task of mindfulness in a society. When we've memorized a text or a song, we say that we know it by heart, which suggests a level of possession and knowledge that's rooted at the core of our being. George Steiner once wrote, what we know by heart becomes an agency in our consciousness, a pacemaker in the growth and vital complication of our identity. What we know by heart dwells in us richly. And communities can know things by heart as well. And in the community of the church, prayers and music and poetry, all of which are included in the Psalms, are things that have been known by heart. So the church, I would argue, if it's to be faithful must be faithful to its nature as a community as well as to the Lord who called it into being. And its nature as a community is that it is a body in time. It has a history, it has a trajectory. We are members of one another and we share that membership with those who are no longer with us. We're simply the tail end of a long procession of faith described in the 11th chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, the most recent addition to a cloud of witnesses. We are saved as individuals, but not individualistically. And so when we gather, when we assemble as the Ecclesia, the assembly of God, we're commanded to engage in a kind of body building, to build one another up. We're to build one another up, not individualistically, but to nourish the body by nourishing its members. And Paul informs us that music is one of the processes whereby that edifying occurs. That's a text I read earlier. The edifying that occurs in the church through its music is not simply a matter of stoking sheer enthusiasm. And this is something I think, all kinds of music can be used just to stoke enthusiasm. All kinds of music from Brahms to whatever could, can be used just to as a kind of pep rally. Some music does that more starkly than others and more, but I think it's always important that we're not just stoking enthusiasm. Sheer zeal, we need to be zealous, but sheer zeal doesn't issue an obedience. And so the work of education has to do more than excite us. I don't know if you remember, years ago there were commercials on TV for a device that allowed you to build up your muscles without actually exercising. It looked like something with, you put like little electrodes. And maybe, I'm sure there's some science behind this. But I was watching, those commercials are spooky because you see this kind of jittering going on and it's like supposed to be bodybuilding. And so the electrodes cause the muscles to twitch spasmodically and apparently that's good for you. Now those muscles look enthusiastic, but I don't think that's the way of building up the body that fits the nature of the human body as God has actually made it. Something is happening. Something mysterious and awful is happening, but I'm not sure it's a good thing with those that kind of twitching. Now we could embark on a program of twitching for Jesus, of encouraging people to twitch for Jesus. And I'm afraid a lot of the pep rally worship is twitching for Jesus. But the health of the members of the body consists in more than cycles of stimulated spasm. If the music that we employ merely excites rather than shapes enriches, admonishes, and connects, then we're not honoring the body that is the body of Christ. The connection that we require forms the joints and ligaments of the body. The forces that work against our dismemberment, that's what the joints and ligaments are. They keep us together and they include the active love and service of one another and the honoring of those over us in the Lord, those teachers and prophets and apostles and martyrs who've been the conduits of the faithfulness. So the building up of the body includes the building of its memory of itself so that what it knows by heart will shape it into something lovely and strong. And that's one reason I think, complicated reason, but it's one reason why I think we need to build an understanding of the church's folk music. That is the music of the church as a people. And its folk music includes Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, Lutheran chorales, Baroque cantatas, Anglican psalm chants, Wesleyan hymns, 19th century part songs and anthems, settings of the mass still be written today. Those are all part of our folk tradition. It's a remarkable tradition with a great deal of variety and great forms of creativity. But sadly, it seems to me that many church musicians today are not at home in the tradition of their own people. They're more at home with the expressions of various secular entertainers and advertisers whose musical idioms have not been developed for the sake of promoting prayer, humility, the cultivation of patience, wisdom, and the appreciation of silence, which is what our folk music was cultivated to do in different forms. Several years ago, I was speaking at a student group at the University of Virginia. On something not related at all to music. And a young man came up to introduce himself. He was the husband of a woman I'd met earlier. And I asked him what he did. He said enthusiastically, he was a musician. And I asked what instrument. And he said he was a singer-songwriter. And that he played in the worship band at a church in Charlottesville where I live. And without pause, it was almost like, I play in the worship band at Christ Church semicolon. We're taking all those old hymns and getting rid of the music, but keeping the words and writing new music. Now, my initial gut instinct was to say, why in the world would you wanna do that? And to ask him what possesses you to think that that's a good idea. He was so proud of this project and apparently thought that I would find it admirable. But instead of saying what I was thinking, I nodded pleasantly and smiled rather weakly at him. And as I thought about this, I've thought, now I know this is a very common thing and I'm not at all opposed to new settings of old texts or new texts for old musical settings. But the assumption that we need to get rid of all of the old tunes and settings and write entirely new tunes seems to me to be exactly wrong. And we may be the first generation in church history that's felt that that's a good idea. In fact, I'm continually impressed by how throughout centuries, the church's melodic inheritance has been preserved in creative ways. The way in which melodies that had become rich with theological and spiritual association were rearranged and set in new settings. And I haven't done the thinking I would like to and I'll have to talk to Scott and see if he probably knows a bibliography he can give me on the nature of melody and how is melody meaningful? And the persistence of melodic forms over time is really, it's very, very remarkable. Again, I would argue that for the church to be a people means that we're in possession of a set of practices that identify us. There are prayers that we say. There are bodily gestures that express our devotion. There are rituals that frame our affirmation and songs that we sing. If we were just an institution with a message, getting rid of the tunes wouldn't matter. But if the church is a people with a way of life and a historical rootedness with a set of practices that bind us together and that bind us to our spiritual ancestors, then the tunes shouldn't be casually dismissed. The restless and rootless insistence on novelty which is characteristic of our age isn't a cultural habit that the church should endorse or encourage. It's not that new things are bad things. But an entrenched and arrogant suspicion about old things is a bad thing. I think it's destructive for persons and it's destructive of communities. Christianity is a historical faith. It's rooted in the history of God's interaction with human history, a history that's still in process. Christianity is not just a set of abstract and timeless ideas, though it does rely on knowledge of certain timeless realities. But what we believe has been mediated in history because it is about history. It is about God's making of the world, about man's unmaking of the world and God's remaking of the world. So you can't be a thoughtful Christian and be indifferent to history. You can't be an obedient Christian and be suspicious of or indifferent to everything that has happened until just now. And one way in which that historical sense is sustained is through our practice of traditions, including our musical forms. Some of you may be familiar with T.S. Eliot's essay, A Tradition in the Individual Talent, which was written in the early 1920s and which challenged a popular assumption then that awareness of or concern about sustaining a literary tradition was an archeological mentality, not one of vibrant creativity. I've heard clergy say the same thing about preserving the church's traditions. We're not curators of some dusty collection. Well, no, we're not curators. We're stewards. And the cultural inheritance that we receive is not a dead thing that we dutifully preserve in a museum, but a living thing in which we have our life. And I find it odd to encounter clergy who honestly believe that there's a richer medium for sustaining the life of the community of faith in the musical output of Nashville and Hollywood than in two millennia of the church's own musical explorations. Back to Eliot. Eliot insisted that tradition properly understood wasn't just the vain repetition of what the previous generation had done, but that tradition involved living with what he called a historical sense. A historical sense was, as he writes, quote, nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his 25th year. And the historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence. The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe, from Homer, and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal, and of the timeless and of the temporal together is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. See what he's saying? You can't understand what it means to be of your time, unless you have a sense of where in time your time is, of what part of this long trajectory of how it is both continuous and discontinuous with where your culture or even all of humanity has been in some sense. So I love this observation. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal, and of the timeless and the temporal together is what makes a writer traditional, and it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. I'll insert a musical footnote. James McMillan is a contemporary composer who's written orchestral work, but mostly choral music. And I find it interesting as his work has developed that more and more there's more of a sense of the tradition of choral music as his work develops. And I don't think it's because he's coming more conservative. I think he's figuring out how to be more contemporary and allow the tradition to come through what he's writing now, which is very much something that couldn't have been written 100 years ago or 400 years ago. Now, in the last 30 years or so, it's become common for churches to treat liturgical style like a consumer commodity. So there's a niche market service for the traditional worship and one for contemporary worship. If Eliot's right, if Eliot's right that the only way for a poet to be fully contemporary, the only way to be fully expressive in one's own time is to have a perspective on the distinctiveness of one's own time. A perspective that's enabled because the poet has been informed and shaped by inhabiting a tradition that transcends a particular moment. Then to separate the tradition the contemporary doesn't make sense. I would argue that uncritical immersion in the spirit of the age doesn't even achieve being contemporary. It's not a wise way to worship. It's not even a good way to be relevant. In a time that is culturally and spiritually confused, no one is assisted if the church simply mimics conventional confusion. One of the signals of our own cultural confusion is the insistence of a kind of cultural affirmative action which proclaims that no one has the right to make the judgment that some cultural forms of expression are more adequate or more fitting or more enduring or more beautiful than others. We should never allow the honoring of tradition to be reduced to a mere preference. And I've heard people say, well, you prefer tradition. Some people prefer contemporary. Some people prefer tradition. The honoring of tradition in forms of cultural expression I think is a necessary posture of human flourishing and a necessary component of the survival of communities. Oliver O'Donovan who some of you may know who's a ethicist moral philosopher taught at Oxford for many years and then at Edinburgh. Most of his work has been in either political theology or in medical ethics. But he wrote a book called Common Objects of Love which is actually based on a series of three lectures he gave on the nature of community. Communities are those, and here I think the phrase is actually from Augusta. True communities are united by the fact that they have common objects of love. They're things that they love in common. And O'Donovan argues there that the fifth commandment, the duty to honor one's parents is essential to understanding the nature of communal traditions. O'Donovan writes, the paradigm command of tradition is honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land which the Lord, your God gives you. It appears to our eyes to be concerned with the duties of children, but this is a mistake. The duties of children are purely responsive to the duty of parents to be to their children what their parents were to them. This is a command addressed to adults whose existence in the world is not self-posited but the fruit of an act of cultural transmission which they have the duty to sustain. The act of transmission puts us all in the place of receiver and communicator at once. The household is envisaged as the primary unit of cultural transmission. The father and the mother as representing every existing social practice which it is important to carry on. Only so can community sustain itself within its environment, the land which the Lord, your God gives you. No social survival in any land can be imagined without a stable cultural environment across generations. By tradition, society identifies itself from one historical moment to the next and so continues to act as itself. O'Donovan wrote a book called The Desire of the Nations which is a very demanding book. Any of you interested in political philosophy would be urged to read this book. And he argues that the essence of political authority includes the maintenance of real power that is the ability to do something to affect political authority. Secondly, the making of good judgments, particularly the judicial work of government. And thirdly, he maintains that the sustaining of tradition is an absolutely essential aspect of political authority. I actually interviewed him recently and he said what we've been seeing going on in Egypt and where we had a coup because someone was trying to move the society in a direction too far too fast that it wasn't ready to entertain is a good instance of the fact that people will not acknowledge political authority that doesn't sustain some sense of continuity. Now here he's talking not so much about political authority but about cultural identity. In accordance with the warp and the wolf of God's creation, a society or a community or a people is like an ecosystem. Just as in the lives of individuals or gardens there are certain conditions according to which health and prospering are necessary. So it is that communities require certain conditions to survive and to thrive. The 10 commandments in particular and much of biblical law in general are given to us not as arbitrary rules but as revealed indicators of the required order of human life well lived. Now there aren't any laws about music or aesthetics as such but there is an indication that communal health is not served by an unbalanced pursuit of cultural novelty. Now that pursuit of novelty is characteristic of modern culture. Modern culture is the first culture in human history to define itself in terms of its position in time, the first culture to deliberately repudiate the past. I would argue that's not healthy for human beings or communities, it's certainly not healthy for the church and when the churches imitate that repudiation of the past they're not really doing the loving thing for their neighbors. Wendell Berry, some of you may know, a poet essayist and farmer, part time farmer in an essay of his called Christianity and the Survival of Creation pointed out that in much of modern Christianity there's a kind of Gnostic heresy that regards the material world as evil or unclean and one way that Christians behave like Gnostics is by ignoring their cultural heritage. Modern Christianity, Berry writes, is uninterested in the arts by which humankind connects itself to nature. It manifests no awareness of the specifically Christian cultural lineages that connect us to our past. There is for example, a splendid history of Christian poetry in English that most church members live and die without reading or hearing or hearing about. I wanna pause for a moment of silence because of this great tragedy. Most sermons, Berry writes, are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. That's a nice way of putting it. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without reference to the heritage of church architecture or respect for place. They embody no awareness that work can be worship. Most religious music now attests to the general assumption that religion is no more than a vaguely pious and vaguely romantic emotion. I wanna share the time we have left a little bit more from another essay by Berry, an earlier essay written in 1974 called The Specialization of Poetry. And it's in a collection of his called Standing by Words. And it includes some very wise remarks about the preoccupation with being fashionable or up to date that characterizes in Berry's view many modern poets. Berry felt this was very tragic for poetry. And he says this after he's reviewed a number of interviews with poets who talk about how they're trying to push the edge and how preoccupied they are with doing new things. Literary talk now seems remarkable for its lack of interest in tradition. The poets in these interviews are preoccupied with the new, with the modern world and modern times. They speak of very few poets who began to publish before World War II. Almost none who lived before this century. Some of these poets seem to dismiss the past simply by lack of interest. Others show a sort of vindictiveness against it, typically expressed in generalized condemnations of traditional forms. Now, I intervene here for a minute. It should be obvious that this ignorance or indifference toward cultural achievements of the past isn't confined to poets. The cultural lives of most Americans have very few expressions of literature, music or film that's older than a few decades. I was in a cab several years ago in New England and got to talking to the Gabby at length and we'd start talking about movies and then we started talking about old movies and he informed me that his wife refuses to watch any movie in black and white because it's old and it must not be good. And I felt, what a tragedy, some of the great, great old films. Similarly, most people go through life listening to and being aesthetically shaped by music that was popular when they were teenagers and nothing earlier than that. When schools and churches took their role as cultural authorities more seriously there was a greater possibility that great artistic works created by people who are actually dead, some of them long dead would animate the imaginations of lay people but today that's less likely. Now, Barry says in this essay that many interviews with poets that he reads there seems to be an effort to sound compulsively fashionable, to be up to date which he says is a symptom of what he calls the modern cult of originality. Quote that this eagerness to replace the old with the new justifies itself by the alleged uniqueness of the strains and demands of the modern world does not necessarily ennoble it. The modern world is after all largely the product of merchandisers whose argument has been essentially the same throughout history. And then he argues that contemporaneity in the sense of being up with the times is of no value. Contemporaneity is of no value. I like that star, I'm gonna put that on a bumper sticker. Wakefulness to experience as well as to instruction or an example is another matter. So just to be sheerly contemporaries of no value but to be wakeful about what's happening is very valuable. What we call the modern world is not necessarily and not often the real world. And there is no virtue in being up to date in it. It is a false world based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical. A world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the materials, the disciplines, the restraints and the work necessary to support human life and have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all wakeful and responsible people, dead, living and unborn are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having. What is needed is work of durable value. The time or age of it matters only after the value has been established. That a good poet is our contemporary reassures us of the continuing liveliness of certain possibilities. The contemporaneity of a worthless poet is a depressant. But there is much that we need that we cannot get from our contemporaries. Even assuming that the work we have from them is the best that is possible. They cannot give us the sense of the longevity of human experience, the sense of the practicable of proven possibility that we get from older writing. Our past is not merely something to depart from, it is to commune with, to speak with, day unto day utter a speech and night unto night showeth knowledge. What an interesting insertion of the biblical text. Remove this sense of continuity. Remove this sense of continuity of the presence of the past as Eliot calls us. And we are left with the thoughtless present tense of machines. I love that. If we fail to see that we live in the same world that Homer lived in, then we not only misunderstand Homer, we misunderstand ourselves. The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it. If, as I believe, one of the functions of tradition is to convey a sense of our perennial nature and of the necessities and values that are the foundation of our life, then it follows that without a live tradition, we are necessarily the prey of fashion. We have no choice but to emulate the arts of the practical man of commerce and industry whose mode of life is distraction of spirit and whose livelihood is the out-dating of fads. When Barry gets really warmed up, he starts to sound like Solomon. Either in problems or ecclesiasties, it depends. Then towards the end of the essay, he says, why is it necessary for poets to believe like salesmen that the new inevitably must replace or destroy the old? Why cannot poetry renew itself and advance into new circumstances by adding the new to the old? Why cannot the critical faculty and poets and critics alike undertake to see that the best of the new is grafted to the best of the old? On closing, to give a couple of examples in terms of music, I'm an amateur musician and a very amateur music director of my church. I'm actually more of a scheduler and coordinator than a music director because I've got a tiny little choir, all of whom are better trained than I am. And I basically choose repertoire and make sure they show up for rehearsals. And then change the repertoire when I don't have enough people to cover all the parts. So that's the most creative thing I do, actually. Three people, okay, birds, three-part mass. We're gonna do that this Sunday. And in that work, I'm continually impressed with the, as I mentioned before, the longevity of melodies where eighth or ninth century plain chants are altered in the 16th century and become chorale melodies in Lutheran hymns or in Baroque cantatas, which is really quite remarkable. One of my favorites is the Plain Chant, the Lutheran chorale, Nune Komm der Heide in Highland, which is an Advent chorale, which is based on, I'm blanking Vinnie, I'm blanking on the Latin of the original Plain Chant. But it's based on a Plain Chant that was sung for centuries to a text by Ambrose. So we have a mid-fourth century text sung to a tune for centuries. And Luther, rather than saying, let's get rid of all those old melodies, he just revised them slightly, even a mount made them a little metrical, easier to sing in German. There are hymns based on that, and then Bach comes along and writes at least two cantatas based on Nune Komm der Heide in Highland, and it shows up in other settings. There are other instances of this. The Easter Plain Chant, Victime Paschale Laudez. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Okay, that becomes the chorale melody Chris Lough in Todesbanden. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da. No, no, I'm confusing the two now, sorry, I get them confused. Which was one of Bach's favorite melodies, and favorite chorale melodies. He wrote a whole cantata based on it, it shows up frequently. And then that's a melody I was doing a little research of Paul Creston, who's an early 20th century composer. His third symphony, which is subtitled Three Mysteries. In all three movements he uses plain chant melodies, and in the third movement Resurrection, he uses Victime Paschale Laudez, it shows up. So that was a symphony written in 1950. Of course, many of you are familiar with what Maurice Durifle did in his, the Requiem as well as in the anthems based on Gregorian chant. And as recently as 1999 Morton Lordson took the same Ubi Caritas that Durifle had written back in the 60s I think. And gave another treatment of this for another generation. So I think that that is a way in which Yaroslav Pelikin, the church historian, wrote a book called The Vindication of Tradition, which was actually based on a lecture he gave in Washington years ago, the Jefferson lecture. And he distinguished there between dead traditionalism and living tradition. And I think that's something that, unfortunately that's a distinction that some of many of our contemporaries can't quite recognize. But I would encourage you all to, and I'm sure you are already doing this, you don't need my encouragement. But I hope these are some helpful ideas for the work that you're doing. I'm sorry I went so long, I didn't intend to go quite so long. So we have a little bit of time for questions, and I'll be glad to stick around for a little bit. Ripping people away from their tradition very quickly. Yeah. And that silly thing during church has almost created a new tradition. Right, right. So what would you advise us? Yeah. We want to re-appoint them. Right, right. It's not wise just to rip them off. Yeah, right, right. Well again, I think to recover, to begin to recover, I mean part of the problem is that the new tradition, I mean in a sense this has happened in American history. This has happened before in American history. In Protestant American history particularly. And I mean I would say that to introduce, I mean I think there are ways of introducing older things. I mean I've wondered, fortunately the church I'm in, it's an Anglican church and so we have no problem with older traditions. In fact for some people, yeah go back and get older. But I think, you know I wonder, if there's, I think first of all you'd have to confront the deliberate prejudice about anything written before I was born, which characterizes a lot of people, or before I turned 16. And I think that really need, I think that does need to be confronted. And I think that not just in music, but I think in terms, and I'm actually encouraged, I mean what it was 30 years ago now that Robert Weber began this kind of ancient future church idea. And so you have people who are interested in all sorts of historic Christian practices. You know you go to a Baptist church that has a tenebrae service. What is that about? How did Baptist discover that? I was with Ralph Wood recently, who teaches at Baylor and we were sharing a meal together and I noticed he's crossing himself and he's still a Baptist. So when Baptists start to make the sign of the cross, something is up. So, and even in churches that are very deliberately contemporary, there are often pockets of discovering of other practices. So if you can push that and basically say, well why not some of the musical practices of the church? So let's try some acapella singing maybe. Ooh, that's pretty radical. First Baptist unplugged, okay. Try some acapella music or try to teach people to sing in parts. We actually started a vacation music school in our church. I mean I think part of it starts with just teaching basic musical literacy. And don't assume, I think the churches have to assume that they need to be music educators and not just music providers.